Following claims that Derry City Football Club could be on the verge of folding at the weekend, Derry City Chairman Pat McDaid gave Derry News reporter Gary Ferry a full and frank interview about the current situation threatening the club. In today’s interview he explains why the club is in trouble, what has happened to the Celtic transfer money and why the club needs to start from scratch, He insist that despite concerns, Derry City Football Club is not going anywhere.

What is your response to the players going public?

The first thing I want to say is that as a club and a board, we fully appreciate the position that the players are in; not just the players, but the backroom staff, management, office staff and coaching staff. It’s certainly not a position we’re happy about but the fact is we are where we are and we’ve got here due to a long number of reasons over a number of years.
But we were also very disappointed that the players chose to come out and criticise the club; criticising the same people who are trying to resolve the issue. We’re really surprised given that last Wednesday evening, the players’ representatives came and met the entire board and we had a very open discussion. The players wanted complete honesty and clarity and that’s what they got. We told them the position the club was in. We told them why it was in the position it’s in and we told them how the club’s going to move forward and what sort of structure would be introduced from the off-season onwards; which will be a totally different Derry City.
We made several commitments to them in terms of what we could do to address their wages, bearing in mind the wages for October are not due until this Friday. We told them we were having several meetings with several people who can help the club and are willing to help the club. We asked them could we leave it until nine o’ clock on Monday morning and we would have a firm and concrete proposal in front of them, to address not only October’s wages, but wages until the end of the season and the wages due back from August, and we can’t understand why they weren’t prepared to wait until Monday morning.
The actions they took in the paper have seriously undermined our ability to actually fix the problem and that’s going to make it even more difficult than it was before Friday, and it was already difficult enough.

Are the predictions of relegation or worse accurate?

Derry City is a very proud club. It has been in existence for over eighty years and whilst we are in a traumatic phase, Derry City will have a future. Now what that future entails depends on a number of issues, specifically what happens between now and December 21. Part of the licensing criteria is specific to players wages and if they are not all paid in full or an agreement out in place by that date, then you face a real risk of not being granted a Premier Division license, so that’s a real issue for the club at the moment and one that we’re fully aware of. And that’s why we’re so devastated by Friday’s article, which has actually undermined our ability to get through this.

Will October’s wages be paid in time?

To be completely honest, given what’s happened on Friday, we face a range of issues that we now have to deal with before we can provide any clarity on wages. We were quite confident that we could get through this, but several things have now happened, following Friday’s article which has put the club into a tail spin. It has brought seriously bad publicity to the club. The players are talking about the reality of what they’re dealing with but the way they have handled it certainly hasn’t helped the situation.